Telecoms standards overlord ETSI has postponed its vote on the official tiny SIM design until the end of May - while carefully considers who it can afford to upset the least.
There are two proposals for the fourth form-factor (4FF) SIM chip, one from Nokia and one from Apple, and the European Telecommunications Standards …

Re: And the choice is between ...

If ETSI does not adopt Apples version then it won't be covered by FRAND terms and the patent hammer will fall. Unlike their current disputes, where FRAND guarantees they'll get a licence however long they drag out compliance, without FRAND they'll have no possibility of shipping at all if patent holders don't feel like licensing.

Annoying so many patent holders with dubious and sometimes frivolous and abusive patent threats leaves a lot of people willing to shut them down.

So it can't happen with any pretence of compatibility with existing SIM tech and without compatibility the carriers won't sign up.

Apple can't win the tech war ...

I can't believe those morons think they have something to say about basic technology, something Apple never ever touched because it has nothing to do with their clothing and fad business.

Seriously, how can anyone listen to such a company when they never even made one phone that had good signal ?

OTOH nokia fails pretty hard too so ... my conclusion is that none of these two should decide the standard for anything, as standards should be decided by people with a brain, and not people with an eye on my wallet.

Re: Apple can't win the tech war ...

Re: Apple can't win the tech war ...

No reason for ad hominem ... but I understand I didn't detail my point of view.

Apple are tech ignorants, they now nothing of technology, only of marketing and sales.

It's all very good and makes them tons of cash, we all agree and stuff but that still doesn't mean they should have anything to say in a technical matter.

Now if you are happy to see the people with the money to make more absurd tech decisions so humanity's evolution is delayed yet another century, well go ahead - I just hope you actually make billions out of people's ignorance too.

Re: 4FF - will we need tweezers?

The first SIM formfactor was designed at a time when most "mobile" phones were like every other "mobile {noun}" in the English language: something housed in a vehicle. The credit-card sized SIM was no hardship then -- in fact it made it easier to insert the thing while pulling out of a garage.

Making it an ISO 7816 smart card also allowed SIMs to be cheaply sourced from multiple vendors, many of whom were already supplying smart car phone cards to the telephone operators (in the UK, BT was rather late to adopt chip cards for payphones, but these were widely used elsewhere from the early 1990s).

I seem to remember that my very first phone, a Nokia 1631, used a 1FF SIM, as did the first Motorola StarTAC GSM phones, but they were already in the minority: by the time I changed to a Nokia 6110 in late 1998, 2FF SIMs were ubiquitous.

MicroSIM is something I don't see the point of. It's not sufficiently smaller than 2FF to warrant all the messing around.

NFC

Re: NFC

There's nothing to figure out to fit NFC stuff into a SIM.

i.e. it's small enough to be put in there if you feel like it (barring possible antenna) - but as you suggested, it's totally useless, nobody wants their nfc / bluetooth / any form of communication to be dependant on a carrier-related SIM card.

The truth about SIM is that it needs to disappear, its a physical item that has no reason to exist, it could be replaced by software and should've been long ago.

Re: NFC

It was the Secure Element part of the NFC spec that was to be housed in the SIM, not the entire antenna, so that isn't derailed by these new standards. With current processes, there's plenty of room on even Nokia's tiny design for a very complex piece of circuitry.

There are two problems with putting an antenna in a mini SIM. The first is pure physics, the second is more to do with how phones are constructed.

First, the size of coil needed for accurate NFC is only just small enough to fit on a mini SIM, and isn't really great once you take into account the distance between SIM and casework, or any additional protective cases on both the phone and the terminal. (As a guide, the coil radius should be around 1.414 times the read distance - as it deviates from this, sensitivity decreases).

However, the second problem is bigger: Even if you could get by with a smaller coil, you have to overcome the problem that many phone designs deliberately place the SIM behind RF shielding along with the rest of the baseband and general computing circuitry. This shielding, as well as the large battery that invariably lies between the SIM and the rear casing of the device, will further reduce the sensitivity of your antenna - quite possibly to the point of it not working at all.

Re: NFC

Re: Software SIM - good on paper, but would hinder competition

If you didn't look beyond technology, then software SIM makes sense. In the real world, it's a bad idea, because it allows operators to convince customers into thinking that their new "Vodafone" phone is somehow incompatible with a Telefonica, Orange, or even "No-frills Mobile Service X" service plan in future.

That removable SIM, the one they had to insert into the new phone, and the only part of the package that bore any operator branding, makes it very clear which bit of the experience is being provided by the operator, and it's something that's clear even to people who have so little use for computers that "another login" would be one login too many to manage.

Apple have long been a proponent of software SIM, but they brought us that abomination of an activation process using iTunes (Go to operator store, sign contracts, get new iPhone and SIM, be unable to use said phone until you get to your own PC and install and run iTunes and give it your credit card details - WTF?) - is that what we'll have to put up with in future?

Software SIM - a bad idea telco's to salivate over

Untethered can also come to mean a user being able to "transfer" his/her paid-for service to another device (battery went dead, device fell in the toilet, screen got cracked, that sort of thing). It also means you can take your favourite smartphone with its apps abroad, swap a local sim and not get shafted with exorbitant roaming charges.

That brings to yet another SIM form factor. The regular mini-sim is small enough to fit into almost anything manufactured in the recent 15 years, barring the iphone and some newer handsets. So I would no longer put my SIM into my venerable veteran Nokia 6310i if I had HTC One or an iphone 4. This could be an inconvenience. But I get the microSIM thing, takes less space so we can have "thinner". But the nano-SIM? the micro-sized one is small enough already.